James Elkins
Forfatter af The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
Om forfatteren
James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, Stories of Art, Visual Studies, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant vis mere Texts, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and Master Narratives and Their Discontents, all published by Routledge. He is editor of Art History Versus Aesthetics, Photography Theory, Landscape Theory, The State of Art Criticism, and Visual Literacy, all published by Routledge. vis mindre
Image credit: Vilnius 2010.
Serier
Værker af James Elkins
What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy (1998) 189 eksemplarer
Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics,… (2008) 22 eksemplarer
The Others, September 27 - October 13, 2002 1 eksemplar
Julie Heffernan 1 eksemplar
Associated Works
Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of… (2010) — Bidragyder — 14 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Juridisk navn
- Elkins, James Preston
- Andre navne
- Elkins, Jim
- Fødselsdato
- 1955-10-13
- Køn
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Fødested
- Ithaca, New York, USA
- Uddannelse
- University of Chicago
Cornell University - Erhverv
- art historian
art critic
university professor - Organisationer
- Art Institute of Chicago
Medlemmer
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Associated Authors
Statistikker
- Værker
- 50
- Also by
- 1
- Medlemmer
- 1,867
- Popularitet
- #13,787
- Vurdering
- 3.6
- Anmeldelser
- 25
- ISBN
- 143
- Sprog
- 4
- Udvalgt
- 2
The number fifty-two seems like it should be significant, as do plenty of the images in the book, the painter’s many references to Christian figures, Greek gods, and contemporaneous guides to alchemy. Elkins observes that no subject ever reaches a point of finality, where we might comfortably claim there is some sense to it. “Nothing is unwelcome, unless she recognizes it,” he writes. (He has decided, quite plausibly, that the artist is a woman.) “I would like to think she lost interest in her project when she began to feel at home in the contours of her imagination.” Elkins wants to avoid meaning and its inevitable outgrowth, narrative, in the work. He seems to struggle against the same impulse in his writing, a form where it is even more difficult to evade, and is aided by a self-imposed limit — a single page of commentary for each painting.
Through his commentary, I found myself led, but not strong-armed, into noticing the many features I had missed about the paintings. His brief explanations of historical context are also helpful. One place of disagreement comes in his thoughts on the title page; he is mildly skeptical of the idea that the inscription might be by the artist herself. In particular, though, the description in these few lines of the painter as an “Ape of Nature” appeals to me — it reminds me of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which an ape named Red Peter explains the method by which, after his capture and transportation to Europe, he fashioned himself into a human. In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has the eponymous writer deliver a lecture in which she notes that “Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason.” I sometimes think this painter must have tried to climb in the opposite direction, journeying into muteness and effecting, as Elkins notes, a certain forlorn distance from the rest of humanity.… (mere)